Test Studio facing major slow-downs and crashing after switching to windows 10

Daniele Bruno

I am working with Test Studio and trying to get my company to purchase this software for our internal testing needs; I am still learning though, and now I have also to overcome some strange but hard technical difficulties.

I recently switched from an older machine to a new one, so I moved from a Windows 7 laptop (64bit, i3 CPU, 4 GB RAM) to a Windows 10 one (64bit, i5 CPU, 8 GB RAM + SSD HDD); this new machine proved to be obviously faster and more reliable than the other one under any circumstance, as it was never used before but just freshly updated to latest versions of drivers and OS.

I saved on a external HDD the whole folder from the older system which carried all of the (working) tests I created there and pasted it in my new computer.

I reinstalled and updated Test Studio, the 3 browsers I was testing (Chrome, Firefox and Explorer 11) to their most recent versions. I was also pleased to see that Test Studio could recognize the folder created on the older system and import the test plan and their relative resources inside the interface in the new PC.

I installed the plug-ins, extensions, all the desired add-ons for the three browsers to work with Test Studio, on replay as well as on record side.

I started working on Test Studio and here came the disaster: I am having a terrible performance, the program runs ok while not testing, but the real problems starts when doing so.

----LAUNCHING EXISTING TESTS:

Chrome: seems to execute the test at first but then highlights all the wrong places of the web apps and runs slowly

Firefox: doesn't run the test, opens a window and then remains stuck at "preparing browser for automation"

Explorer11: seems to execute the test but highlights all the wrong places of the web apps and runs slowly

----RECORDING NEW TESTS (sometimes it even crashes before launch stuck at "Launching recorder..."):

Chrome: runs incredibly slow, even when staying still with mouse, moves herratically the red highlighting tool everywhere around the web page components and goes as far as filling up my system memory and forcing me to close the browser to stop.

Firefox: opens a new window, but shows the message "Please verify that the Test Studio Recorder extension is installed and enabled in your browser." I knew I did, but I even checked again as this happened: I have "Test Studio Automation" and "Test Studio Recorder" correctly installed and enabled at the moment of execution.

Explorer11: it seems to work somewhat well, surely the best of the three, it starts as a normal test recording and I even manage to highlight parts of the site correctly and even access the context menu, but after a while the highlighting tool starts moving on its own and I can't use the menu effectively anymore.

Ivaylo

I am sorry to hear you are experiencing these difficulties. Unfortunately such environment specific behaviors are quite hard to troubleshoot and investigate. Me personally I am using Windows 10 since day one and I have never experienced such problems.

Regarding highlights on the wrong place please check this article where it is explained the most common reason. Also please note that you may experience problems with highlighting with specific website/application while working fine with the majority of the websites/applications.

We are aware for a specific behavior with Chrome where on extremely heavy websites the highlighting works a bit slow, please note that in order to work correctly you need to have the entire DOM loaded, so when recording please allow some time until the Chrome loads the entire DOM.

Please note that you should always run Test Studio as administrator in Windows 10. Make sure the runner is running as administrator as well.

Also please let me know what is the version of Test Studio you are using.

Daniele Bruno

right now, I am happier, since I'm able to tell you that thanks to your advices I am getting somewhere with the performance.

I managed to run the software almost as good as it did on the older machine: turns out, the major problem was windows and character sizes, which I had adjusted to be bigger: my monitor is quite small and so I mindlessly enlarged my interface almost everywhere I found myself in, and so most of the problems kind of cured themselves as soon as I applied the correction of your linked article. Now everything is freakingly small to read, but at least the program seems to work better.

So, right now, I manage to record tests with all the three browsers - Firefox rarely doesn't cooperate, even if I deleted cache, the folder you pointed out and calibrated after disabling/enabling many times as you showed me to.

On the playback side, Firefox right now still doesn't work, but IE11 and Chrome do, they work and run tests from start to finish; Chrome still finds its highlighting a bit off-place, but since in record mode it works fine, it's not much of a problem.

The major flickering of the highlight, up until slow downs and random crashing seems to have gone away.

Thank you for your assistance, it is always on the spot, very kind and professional.

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